The Social Sciences Are Under Attack in Higher Education

The social sciences have been a consistent target for political operatives around the United States in recent years. The proposed downsizing of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) by former Texas House Republican John Culberson and the attacks on federal funding of social and behavioral sciences by Republican-controlled legislatures are just two examples of the challenges that we have previously reported on.

More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill, SB 266, from the state’s Republican-controlled legislature that has become another example of politics challenging the social sciences in higher education. This legislation has empowered the legislature to revise the core general education courses at universities across the state, specifically involving courses that teach students about race, sexuality, and gender. Among other things, the law also barred colleges and universities across the state from spending funds on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

SB 266 was created with the explicit goal of the “removal, alignment, realignment, or addition of general education courses” to satisfy the requirements of the bill. Various faculty committees at the University of Florida were responsible for carrying out these changes, offering the appropriate revisions and recommendations to the university system’s Board of Governors. These committees offered additional courses that could fulfill the social sciences general education requirement but were unable to recommend the removal of any courses from the requirement.

The committee, for example, did not recommend removing Principles of Sociology, a course taught at the University of Florida – but the course was removed from the requirement due to pressures from political operatives, including Florida’s Education Commissioner, Manny Diaz. While the course will still be taught at the university, SB 266 now prohibits it from fulfilling the social sciences general education requirement. In its place, students will be encouraged to take courses such as Introduction to Oceanography and Introduction to Geology to meet this requirement.  

The proposed removal of Principles of Sociology reaped pushback from stakeholders with vested interests in the matter.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, the American Sociological Association submitted a public comment on the matter. “Failure to expose students to the scientific study of the range of issues faced by American citizens,” the comment reads in part, “would be a failure of civics education. How can we expect students to make positive contributions to their communities if they do not have scientific understanding of the issues facing those communities?”

Florida isn’t the only state challenging the importance of the social sciences. A recent change in North Carolina shows a similar official indifference to the disciplines.

The Republican-controlled General Assembly passed the state budget bill in late October 2023, and among its 625 pages was a provision that prohibited funding distinguished professorships in non-STEM areas at public universities across the state.

In North Carolina specifically, distinguished professorships, scholarships, and fellowships were originally created to “help strengthen the commitment of citizens and organizations in promoting excellence throughout all State universities.” But this new provision has fundamentally altered this goal and has redefined a STEM subject area as “any subject area in a field of scholarship related to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. A subject area in a field of scholarship related to journalism or law is not a STEM subject area.”

Similar to the case in Florida, there was an outcry of confusion and outrage because of this decision made by the General Assembly.

Jay Smith is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently serves at the president of North Carolina’s State Conference of the American Association of University Professors. He said Republican politicians in the state have been actively working to undermine the social sciences for a while now, including the study of the arts, gender, and English.

“This is just sort of the culmination of that – that attitude of contempt that they have toward humanities fields and the people who teach in them,” Smith said.

Members of the UNC System Board of Governors were also shocked by this provision.

John Fraley is a former Republican lawmaker in North Carolina. In his reaction to the provision, he expressed hope that Peter Hans, president of the UNC System, and his staff members “might go back and have some discission with whoever made the change in the legislature to understand exactly why.”

According to Jane Stancill, the spokesperson for the UNC System, there are already over 700 current distinguished professorships in the system. In June 2022, UNC-Chapel Hill alone welcomed over four dozen new distinguished professors to their campus, placing them into eight professional schools and the college of arts and sciences.

Regardless of political ideology, the instances in Florida and North Carolina suggest that the tides are shifting yet again in the United States. An op-ed by the Los Angeles Times speaks to this influence of partisan politics on our education systems, saying that our universities were never created to focus solely on career preparation but should teach “students how to think deeply and critically, analyze smartly, bring people together collaboratively, communicate articulately, as well as innovate and create.” Whether these decisions are inherently political is subjective, but there is large concern over how a world without social sciences may pose a bigger problem than what meets the eye.

The Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) is the foundational benchmark for prospective medical students and tests students on both physical and social sciences. Among the topics of concrete scientific topics, the MCAT also requires students to understand the concepts of first-semester psychology and sociology courses to “provide a solid foundation for learning in medical school about the behavioral and sociocultural determinants of health.” Even for a physical science such as medicine, there are substantial traces of the social sciences spread throughout its foundation.